Page 124 of Blood Beneath the Snow

I forced myself to look back at the corpse of my friend. His lifeless eyes. His blood soaked into his clothes, saturating them.

The sight would be burned into my dreams until I died.

I couldn’t feel my fingers, but I saw them shaking. I raised them to eye level. Blood blurred with skin.

The bell above the door chimed and I whirled, panic lacing through every one of my limbs. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or vomit again when Volkan’s face stared back at me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You’re going to be…” His voice trailed off as his gaze drifted from my face to my hands, tomy blood-soaked dress, to the trail of blood leading behind the counter. The pool of sticky red grew larger by the second.

“Shit.”

I couldn’t move. Volkan pushed past me and peered over the counter to see Halvar lying there. He swore and backed away.

A shuddering breath collected in my lungs, and I wondered distantly if I was about to start screaming again. Volkan paced back and forth in front of me.

“Okay. I’ll deal with this, but you have to go. Now.” He rubbed his palms over his eyes. “Don’t tell anyone what happened here. We can fix this.”

“My dress.” I didn’t feel myself utter the words, but it was my voice, so it had to have been me.

Volkan glanced at the hem, then pulled a dagger from his waistband. “Hold still.” He knelt and sawed through the stained fabric until it was nothing but discarded scraps. “Wash your hands before you go.”

He stood and I looked up at him. “Why are you helping me? I murdered him.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I knew the Hellbringer before that was what they all called him. Back then, he was a scared little boy whose magic killed people by mistake.” Volkan shook his head. “The two of you aren’t so different, you know.”

I forced myself to smother a sob threatening to emerge from my throat.Is this who I am destined to be? Are we the same now? The Hellbringer—who murders soldiers, devastates armies, pretends to love, then betrays all trust—and the Bloodsinger Queen, who killed her brother and her father and her friend, whose magic tears the kingdom asunder?

I picked up the crown on my way out the door and rode to the temple.

No cheers welcomed me fromthe crowd when I rode up to the temple ruins and dismounted from my horse. The tall building was now reduced to ash and rubble, the remaining white marble scattered and coated in gray soot. Freja had told me this morning that the temple burned long into the night, a crowd of both Lurae and Nilurae standing silent vigil.

One of the tall statues remained standing, though. Aloisa stared ahead at a point far in the distance, her face stoic as ever, the rest of the pantheon crumbling on either side of her.

“She wouldn’t fall when they took hammers to her,” Freja had whispered to me over breakfast, despite the fact that we were the only ones in my room. “Some of the Lurae are saying it’s a sign that you’re a tyrant queen—that by banishing the priests, you’ve incurred Aloisa’s wrath.”

I’d merely scoffed over my bowl. Now I found myself strangely glad my blade’s namesake was left here. She hadn’t fallen in the face of fire. And neither had I.

Too bad she’s a figment of the imagination and not a real goddess.

Whispers followed me like swooping vultures following the scent of death on the wind as I ascended the staircase. I ignored them, wishing I couldn’t hear the fragments of their conversations on the wind.

Terrifying.

Murderer.

Tyrant.

Freja came over to me, her hair braided tightly against her head and wound into an intricate updo. She squeezed my hand as I moved toward the throne.

Would she have done the same if she had known whose blood had stained my dress mere minutes ago?

I sat on the throne, which had been brought down the day before. It was made of gold intricately twisted to form a seat. Compared to my father, who sat here last, I was tiny. Nothing.

How long would it take for someone to realize what had happened? For someone to learn I had murdered an innocent man? A Nilurae man. One of my own people.

The rest of the day played out in my mind. Freja, upon discovering Halvar and the evidence of my Lurae, would never speak to me again. If or when Arne returned from the front lines, Freja would tell him what I had done. And with reason enough to hate me already, I knew he would jump on the chance to further justify his animosity toward me.

I swallowed. Yesterday, walking into the arena to face Björn, I’d felt a tiny glimmer of hope amid my resignation. But now…

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